What’s your opinion on hiring friends or relatives? – DSP 61

Graham and Ashkahn over the years have made some difficult choices while running Float On. In this episode they talk about the fortunes and follies of hiring friends to work for them. They’ve had friends that worked on construction, in the shop, building websites… It hasn’t always been the best decision and they’ve lost some friends along the way. So, when is hiring friends the right thing to do? When is it the absolute worst? These guys share their thoughts on the matter.

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Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)

Graham: Today’s question is, “What’s your opinion on hiring friends or relatives?”

Ashkahn: It’s a tricky question.

Graham: I guess in general my advice runs contrary to what we do. It’s one of those do as I say and not as I do kind of things.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: Float On is pretty notorious for this. We’ve gone into business with friends, we’ve worked with friends, we’ve hired friends.

Ashkahn: Yep.

Graham: Sometimes it’s gone incredibly well like with Ashkahn and I. There’s only been one case of attempted murder between the two of us, and other times I’ve lost at least three good friends over working with them in the past, and that’s kind of an unfortunate situation to find yourself in. That’s my opinion, tossing it out there. Discuss.

Ashkahn: Yeah. Basically, we found this I think particularly when hiring not necessarily to work in our shop as a normal kind of shop person, but for like outside expertise. It’s like “Hey, we need this,” and we have this friend who happens to do that or is good at that. So, great, let’s just ask that dude to help us with this.

Graham: Yeah. Yeah.

Ashkahn: This comes up I think probably soonest for people in construction. Where all of the sudden they have a buddy who does drywall or is a general contractor even, or something like that. I think probably more often than not, it doesn’t work out well.

Graham: Yeah, so let’s even break this into a few different categories of that. That’s a really good distinction to make. I would almost say that there is the construction side of things.

Ashkahn: Right.

Graham: There’s the actual work in your shop, operations, they’re shop staff kind of things.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: And then there’s other outside help like marketing or social media, or something external to actually being in your shop and running it.

Ashkahn: Yeah, and the construction stuff I think is some of the hardest, ’cause it’s like all of the sudden you have stuff that just has to happen. It’s like mission critical. Especially, with a float center, you end up riding people so much, and it just really sucks to do that to a friend. When it’s your friend your like “Dude, I’m sorry I know your tired, but you have to stay here until like 11:00 p.m., and finish this thing.

Graham: And they’re already doing you a favor, and they already have  other jobs that are paying them more money that they’re waking up early for.

Ashkahn: You don’t wanna do it, and it sucks for both people, because it’s like you’re straining your relationship, but also he needs to get this done. That’s just way easier to do with someone who you’ve just hired who’s a professional. It’s like “Dude, you said you were gonna do this. This is your job. I’ve hired you to do this. You have to do it.” Those conversations are way easier and way more clear cut when you are kinda pushing back against a person or company that you’ve hired specifically for that purpose.

Graham: Yeah. Specifically with construction, I think, our advice is don’t go with friends or relatives in general.

Ashkahn: It’s especially hard, ’cause it’s probably the reason you’re going with them for one is probably they’re cutting you a great deal.

Graham: Yeah.

Ashkahn: And with construction, that can add up to huge amounts of money.

Graham: Another part of that too is let’s say you do have a friend come in, and they’re the one’s who cut you a good deal on doing your electrical or some plumbing or even doing drywall or something like that, and then a couple years later there’s an electrical fire or one of the plumbing lines breaks, or something like that.

Ashkahn: Right.

Graham: With a normal contractor, there are plenty of things you can do like call them back in if it was actually faulty work, you can call on their bonds to have them pay for things if they’re not willing to do it out of pocket, and then you can take them to court outside of that. You have these realms of legal recourse that you can go through to make things right. Do you really wanna be in a position where that’s what you’re deciding to do or not do with a friend? Either your float center gets paid for the mistake that got made or your friend gets hit for thousands and thousands of dollars and possibly loses their contractor license because you’re going through this.

You never wanna have to make that decision.

Ashkahn: Yeah. I think really the answer is if you have someone who works in construction who you don’t want to be your friend anymore, then you nailed it. You won the lottery. YOu’ll lose the friendship and you’ll get cheap construction.

Graham: Yeah. Like annoying acquaintances who do construction totally bring them on.

Ashkahn: That’s the jackpot.

Graham: I at least rest very firmly in the side of don’t go with friends or relatives for your construction. I guess, let’s do the outsourced on the other side.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: If someone has marketing expertise, they have some social media expertise, and they’re planning on helping you out.

Ashkahn: I think it’s like the same thing. Really, I think getting advice and help, and stuff like that and kinda working on a project is usually been fine and kinda fun, but it’s really at the point where that thing you’re working on with that person is critical to your business.

If you’re relying on them, because you need to do something on a certain timeline or for a certain reason. If it’s serious and important and things are resting on it, that’s when you start getting into the trouble, because you start to have your business needs conflict with your friends needs. When you don’t, when it’s just like “Hey, I wanna play with some new marketing ideas, and I have this friend who’s good at that, and maybe we’ll go out for beers and talk about it, and he’ll help me out with something.” That’s always been great actually, and a really fun way to go about something.

Graham: Yep. I guess the thing to watch out for would be you have a friend who does website design, and they’re oh, great, I’m practicing this new language that I wanna do anyway, let me design you a custom website in that language.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: And that’ll be great practice for me, and you can get a website, right? But on the flip side of that, they just designed a website that’s custom so it’s not gonna be easy to go in for you to change, and they did it in a new language that they’re learning, which might not be the most common language for other people to even get in there. All of a sudden, through a favor, you now have this mission critical thing, which is your website that you rely on this person to update if there’s anything important.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: And that sort of thing has again, been like a recipe for disaster for us. Those are the kinds of things where we end up annoying our friend too much. Even if it’s twice per month, it’s still like okay, I know that I volunteered to do this back in the day. I don’t even do this language anymore. I’m only really doing web design as a favor for you, and those get strained, or they just don’t update the website regularly enough. You change your hours, and the website’s wrong for three extra months, ’cause you can’t get them to go in and update it. Things like that can really cause issues.

Ashkahn: Yeah. For sure. It’s such an easy on to forget about, but ongoing maintenance. You really gotta think about that if someone’s doing something for you. That’s a nice thing about a company. They’re gonna be around, and even if that one person you worked with left, they have a responsibility to have someone else there to help you fix things in the future. You definitely don’t get that stuff when you’re getting kind of a friend to help you out.

Graham: Yeah. I guess my opinion on that side is if you are getting friend help on outside construction outside of the basic operations of the center, make sure it actually has a finish date, or they’re helping you with a discrete project that doesn’t have maintenance that’s going into the future that you need to keep tapping them on the shoulders for, and stuff that’s not critical. Like if they only get halfway through the project, ditch it, no one else can finish the other half? That should be fine. You shouldn’t be out a friend or really much money or anything like that for the project not getting done.

Ashkahn: Okay, so friends work in your shop.

Graham: Yeah, and this is one where it’s actually one of the ways that we hire a lot for Float On as well, is not straight from our friend pool necessarily, but when we do have positions open up, we ask our current shop workers if there’s anyone that they know that they’d recommend for an interview, and that’s how we end up with a fair amount of our kind of interview pool for new positions.

Ashkahn: This one’s interesting, ’cause I feel like it plays into some of the benefits of hiring a friend that these other things don’t necessarily play into, which is that when your hiring for your shop, you’re hiring someone who’s gonna be interacting with your customers and stuff like that, and the big part of your hiring is knowing someone’s personality and stuff like that. You get a big bonus with a friend in that sense, ’cause your like “Hey, I know this person’s cool. I know that they can talk to people in ways that are nice and respectable.” That’s stuff that’s hard to tell in a 20-minute interview, you sit down with someone from Craigslist. So, you have this benefit of being like okay, I kinda trust them to be talking to customers and interacting with them and knowing how to be competent in that sense, and so there actually is that benefit to it, and you can kinda feel if they’re gonna be good for that or not.

Graham: Yeah. I would almost say I personally as an owner of the business now, and we started Float On, by again, just not following any of this advice.

Ashkahn: All we did was hire friends.

Graham: Yeah. All we did was hire our friends immediately, and that’s again, some of my lost friendships come from that, from hiring friends specifically to work our shop, not even for construction.

Ashkahn: Yeah. But not necessarily all of them ended like that. There’s people who were our friends who came, worked our shop for long times, and even got to the point where we had to fire them. It wasn’t even a nice kind of termination. We had to straight up just fire them, and we’re still friends with them. It was cool. Things are actually okay, and we’ll still hang out. It was not actually like a big deal.

Graham: So it’s a mixed bag. It can go either direction.

Ashkahn: It can definitely go either way.

Graham: But was I was gonna say though is I think I actually like staff hiring people they know, or having the shop staff recommend people that they know, rather than us owners.

Ashkahn: Right.

Graham: Recommending people to go in, and there’s something about just having that highest level of decision making power where someone really needs to get chewed out, or someone needs to get fired or something like that, where you don’t have to weigh your friendship against disciplinary action or give them a third chance when all they deserved was a second chance.

Ashkahn: Right.

Graham: Whatever it is like that. Especially in the early days, at least for me. I think I’m just a huge pushover and stuff like that, but I have a really hard time drawing that line, and chewing out friends, and I think as a result, we ended up with some staff members who stuck around longer than they should have.

Ashkahn: Yeah. Definitely.

Graham: To the detriment of the business, because my friendship got in the way of the decision that I probably should have made as a business owner.

Ashkahn: Yeah. When someone working the shop is thinking about hiring one of their friends, I think there’s some kind of personal repercussions if they don’t do a good job, ’cause they’re gonna have to pick up the slack. If you’re working the shop, you also want the other people working to be good at their job, and cleaning up well, and stuff like that. We’ve had a lot of times where “Hey, let us know if you have friends you think would be good here.” People are like, you should never hire any of my friends. Those guys? No, you don’t want them in here.

Graham: That’s almost a verbatim quote from one of our staff members too.

Ashkahn: I think there’s a little bit more kind of repercussions that puts people in a slightly more cautious mindset when you’re gonna be working alongside them instead of above them.

Graham: Yeah. Absolutely. All right.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: So, there’s three different categories of hiring friends. If you have any other kooky questions you wanna send our way, shoot ’em over to FloatTankSolutions.com/podcast.

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